It’s hard to challenge a sentence or conviction in a federal court – and the Supreme Court made it even harder on Monday. At 6-3 Decision In the case of Shinn v. Ramirez, the court found that the two men sentenced to death had no right to present new evidence in federal court showing that they had ineffective attorneys at trial.
The decision increases the likelihood that innocent or ineligible people will remain in custody or even face the death penalty.
Following the court’s decision, the death sentence remains intact for Barry Lee Jones, a man with a credible plea of innocence, and David Martinez Ramirez, who may have intellectual disabilities preventing him from the death penalty.
In a broader way, the court has set a new precedent that prevents a meaningful path for people who say they have not been well served by bad lawyers. If an individual has an ineffective lawyer at trial then it will end Others An ineffective attorney who fails to prove that his client has an ineffective attorney at trial, this person may have no opportunity to present the matter in court.
A federal habeas review in which a federal court can review the legality of individual detention should be protection from unfair consequences in a state court, but the Supreme Court increasingly ends that protection. The stakes are particularly high for people facing the death penalty. Despite the common misconception that the death penalty is “worst”, it is usually people who suffer from violence, poverty, intellectual disability or untreated mental illness. They often relied on court -appointed lawyers, many of whom would not hear a death sentence.
“This decision has been overturned. It is unreasonable,” Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the dispute, along with Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan. with effective help from a lawyer, “Sotomayor continued.
The decision of the Supreme Court in Shinn v. Ramirez includes separate cases of Jones and Ramirez who were both tried and sentenced to death in Arizona. Both men struggled to seek legal help during the trial. In a subsequent process of state appeals – a period of ineffective assistance at the requests of solicitors – both of their attorneys did not. As a result, Jones and Ramirez sought help in federal court.
“Thus, the court’s decision undermines the right of many Sixth Amendment applicants to effective assistance from an attorney.”
– Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomior
There are extensive procedural barriers to raising issues in federal courts that have not yet been raised in state courts. But he called for a 2012 Supreme Court decision that Martinez v Ryan They created limited exceptions for people like Jones and Ramirez who had ineffective attorneys at trial and during state litigation.
For Jones, it means the opportunity to show evidence of his innocence, which led to his sentence being overturned in 2018 after serving a 23-year death sentence.
Jones is charged with rape and murder of his girlfriend’s 4 -year -old daughter, Rachel, who died in 1994 from a small intestine. The state allegedly attacked him by Jones the day before his death while he was in Jones’ custody. By the time Jones ’attorneys performed primary detective work, they learned that the trauma to Rachel’s abdomen was unlikely to be so quickly fatal and there was no solid evidence that she had been raped. soon Reported. But the jury heard nothing of this evidence and sentenced Jones to death.
Under Arizona law, individuals cannot provide ineffective assistance to solicitors ’requests after a direct appeal, after the first degree of judgment. Instead, they must await further review of the state sentence. Unlike litigation and direct appeal, the right to an attorney is not guaranteed at this stage.
Jones was appointed an attorney who was not technically qualified to represent him after his sentencing, as the attorney later admitted. When the lawyer moved to appoint the investigator, he did so under the wrong law and did not grant the request. The attorney could not argue that Jones received ineffective assistance from the attorney in litigation on Jones’ motion for further sentence change and denied the petition.
Just before Jones reached the habeas federal litigation stage he hired competent attorneys who, in Martinez’s decision in 2012, were able to present new evidence and reversed Jones ’conviction.
Ramirez grew up and ate on the floor in a house full of manure. Her mother drank it during pregnancy and later beat her with power cords. She showed developmental delays, including delays in walking, potty training, and talking, and she had difficulty using edible foods.
Ramirez was charged with assaulting his girlfriend and daughter until his death in 1989. His court provided no further evidence about his abusive childhood or evidence that he had intellectual disabilities that could have resulted in more few death sentences. (Later the Supreme Court It’s being kept The death penalty in 2002 was a cruel and unusual punishment for people with intellectual disabilities.)
As in Jones’ case, Ramirez’s attorneys could not argue that he provided ineffective litigation assistance and denied his subsequent motion of conviction. Like Jones, Ramirez obtained an effective attorney at the federal habeas stage, and the Federal Court of Appeals ordered the district court to allow the formation of relevant evidence.
To hang Jones and Ramirez, Arizona petitioned the Supreme Court to review their cases. The state supported the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), a bill passed by Congress in 1996. This reduced the federal revision of habeasIt did not allow federal courts to hear new evidence in the two cases.
“Innocence is not enough,” Arizona Attorney General Brun Wall Roisden said. Inserted In an oral discussion last year.
In other words, if an innocent person’s attorney fails to show proof of his or her innocence at trial and his or her state attorney fails to prove the ineffectiveness of the court’s attorney, the innocent person is out of luck. .
On Monday, conservative Supreme Court judges agreed, arguing that under AEDPA, the federal abbey court cannot consider evidence other than those in state court records based on ineffective assistance from a state ombudsman. .
Ang Does it make sense Judge Clarence Thomas wrote, that Her husband lobbied lawmakers to cancel the 2020 presidential election. According to opinion, Thomas did not mention Jones ’innocence or Ramirez’s intellectual disability. Instead, he wrote extensively about the “prices” of federal habeas testing, arguing that habea relief is widely available to inmates in “sandba”.[g]State courts will file some requests for further review of a state convict, while others will be bailed for federal habeas review if the former fails.
“This statement is strange,” Sotomayor wrote in his opposition. “Neither the plaintiffs nor the subsequent judgment attorney saw any strategic advantage from the failure of the appropriate judgment ineffectiveness claim in the available forum.
“On the other side of the book, the court assesses or generally ignores the severity of the failure of state systems in these two cases,” Sotomayor continued. “Briefly: two men whose court lawyers did not even provide the minimum level of representation required by the constitution could be enforced because forces beyond their control prevented them from exercising their constitutional rights. . “
Neither Aedpa nor the Supreme Court’s precedent asked the court to decide on the direction it had chosen, Sotomayor wrote.
The majority opinion is based on “AEDPA policy misunderstanding,” “money laundering requests” were rejected by the Supreme Court in Martinez’s case in 2012, Sotomayor continued.
“For this subset of petitions, which receive ineffective assistance in both litigation and further prosecution of state detainees, the Sixth Amendment guarantee is void,” Sotomayor wrote. “Many, if not most, people in this position will not have the opportunity and will not have the opportunity to rest. The responsibility for this disastrous outcome does not rest with Congress, but with this court”.
Source: Huffpost
